


Singularity

by orphan_account



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-22
Updated: 2007-07-22
Packaged: 2017-10-03 17:29:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fred can't figure out what's wrong; Angel isn't helping.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Singularity

**Author's Note:**

> For obsessive24. Thanks to Astrid for the beta.

Fred has dreams of Lilah, and she's not sure why. Red red lipstick and hangman's scarf: Lilah has never liked her, but Lilah's dead, and Fred, quiet soul, won't speak ill of the dead. Her dreams are another matter: _I have a secret,_ Lilah leans over her and whispers, breath tickle-sweet and eyes bright with malice. _The man you love has a secret._

Instead of caves and paint daubed thick on shaking fingers, Fred has PDAs now, and slick polished whiteboards, and logarithmic graph paper. But physics is not like the diagrams of the heart; physics does not care if you write it in paint or blood or felt-tipped pen, or what you write it on. And so, in the lab late at night, Fred writes. Wesley writes in Akkadian and Latin and cryptic rebus; Fred writes the language she knows.

Fred is a mathematician the way every physicist is a mathematician, which is to say that sometimes she uses math to tell herself stories she does not yet know about the universe. _Here lies division by zero,_ says the equation; then somewhere in the world that singularity will be. The math does not lie to her.

This night, as the light overhead flickers--she'll call in the work order tomorrow, but for now it reminds her of caves and sewers and the hotel they abandoned for reasons she can't clearly remember--the math is lying to her. People, now: people do not come packaged in neat arrays of numbers and variables. But you can tell stories about people, too, and tonight Fred has discovered that the people in her life don't add up.

She bites her nails, forgetting that she's wearing nail polish; pauses indecisively over three different whiteboard markers before deciding on the red one. Maybe she wrote in the wrong color. Red is blood; red is truth. Maybe she dropped a term. Maybe she imagined it all.

God, maybe what she needs is some coffee. Except then she'll be asleep on her feet for tomorrow morning's meeting--_today's_ meeting, actually, going by the clock--and that won't do her any good.

All right, she's been tackling this all wrong. If she can't solve it by physics, then it has to be by the inconstant constants in her life. _The man you love,_ Lilah said, silken-sure in the way of dreams. Fred thinks, in a tumble of headachy memories, of nights arched above Charles, of Wesley's desperately assured mouth. Of--

"Fred," a voice says from the doorway. "Shouldn't you be getting some sleep?"

She looks up, warming to the voice: Angel. "I--I couldn't sleep," she says, hating herself for the stammer. She checks herself from moving to block Angel's view of the whiteboard with its scrawled system of differential equations and the undulating border of fanged stick figures and oddments of poetry and Salvador Dali clocks. (She can't help doodling. Her staff will just have to deal with it.) But she can't quell the trembling of her hands.

Fred doesn't know what fear smells like to a vampire, but she reeked of it for seven unendurable years. It clings to her still.

She remembers the first time she saw Angel, knight-tall and unbowed by sunlight. She remembers baiting him with the blood on her fist. She had thought, back then, that she understood blood and deprivation and being stripped to nothing but the parameters of desire.

He doesn't look like a knight now. He looks--can vampires look old? Tired. Like someone has taken the last unbeating remnants of his heart and flensed them bare.

_A secret,_ Lilah's voice whispers, unrelenting.

"We all have secrets," she says, not realizing until she sees Angel's eyes flicker that she's spoken aloud.

"You're tired, Fred," Angel says, as if that needed repeating. "You should be in bed."

The math is lying to her, or Angel is. She is coldly certain of it. She could avert her eyes or smile nervously, the way she has done a thousand thousand times in the past, acknowledge her own eccentricity and promise to go home.

_Lilah would never do that,_ Fred thinks. She tips her chin up and meets Angel's gaze steadily. Maybe this will make the dreams go away, although come to that, she's not certain that's what she wants. "Why are we _here_, Angel?" _Wolf, Ram, Hart._ He doesn't say anything in response, but she takes half a step backwards. His eyes are empty, so deliberately empty that it's breathtaking. _Division by zero._ "What changed in us?"

"People change," Angel says, which is not an answer. He turns to examine the equations, which coincidentally moves him another half-step away from her, as if he's acknowledging her anxiety, giving her room to breathe. She wouldn't have thought that a vampire would understand about people needing to breathe. Or perhaps a vampire would understand best of all.

"People change," Fred says. "But there are _constraints_, Angel, they don't suddenly become different people. We used to add up and we don't anymore." Angel is motionless again. This time Fred holds her ground. She's wielded crossbows and guns. She shot him once and she can shoot him again.

This time she'll have to use words, is all.

Before she can blink, he's caught her wrists and has her pinned against the whiteboard. The marker is going to rub off on her lab coat, she just knows it. It's strange how the mind can think of such things instead of panicking, can admire the precise calculation of force that keeps her trapped without crushing her bones. "Maybe it's not about addition," Angel says. There's a note in his voice like confession deferred too long. "Maybe it's about subtraction. Maybe it's about giving up everything you believe in for everything you love."

"You're not making any sense," Fred says.

His grip tightens fractionally. She can feel the bruises forming. "Then why are you here?" he asks.

"We don't have to stay," Fred says. "It's not too late." She turns her head, tries to translate the equations for him with the movements of her eyes. It doesn't work that way, but the habit runs too deep.

"Time's arrow runs one way," Angel says, a little cruelly. "We'll miss you if you leave, but if that's what you want--"

"No," she says over his voice. Deliberately, she arches her back, tilts her head to one side. "How would you know what I want?" Her voice rises. When has he ever asked her what she _wanted_? "Do you think I'm going to run like a little girl because you scowled at me?"

"I think you're anything but a little girl," he says, releasing her.

She catches herself against the whiteboard, whirls, and wipes a swathe through the red writing with her sleeve. "Is that enough subtraction for you? There. No more equations. Just people. _Talk to me._"

He looms over her, close, too close. Her lips part. His mouth covers hers. He knows to the second when she needs to breathe. "Tell me what you know."

She drags his head down again. If she shuts her eyes she can pretend they're in the cave again, that the guttering light against her eyelids is fire. There was the shining center of her world, that night.

Angel doesn't resist. Fred explores his teeth with her tongue and is disappointed to find that they are perfectly ordinary teeth, in this face. She expected them to taste different, somehow. Then she pulls back and says, "What was your deal with Lilah?"

For a stark second she expects to die.

"Nothing," he says. "Nothing." He peels back her lab coat and scatters kisses along her collarbone. Rolls up the hem of her blouse with careful fingers, kisses circles around her navel.

He's lying, and they both know it. Every touch is poisoned by the empty space between them. And she presses herself against him, trying to close the gap, trying to match skin to skin, and only emptying herself in the process.


End file.
